‘Everything Store’ nothing short of unbalanced, says Bezos wife

November 5, 2013 12:14 am

‘Everything Store’ nothing short of unbalanced, says Bezos wife

By Barney Jopson in Los Angeles

Jeff Bezos’s wife has deployed one of her husband’s most celebrated innovations – the unfiltered product review on Amazon – to trash a high-profile new book about the online retailer and its founder. MacKenzie Bezos, who is a novelist, offered a withering critique and a one-star ratingfor The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, a book by Brad Stone, a technology reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek.Mrs Bezos complained that the book contained “numerous factual inaccuracies” and was “unbalanced” because it highlighted negative accounts of working life at Amazon while treating more positive assessments dismissively.

Her criticisms generated a new round of publicity for the book on Monday and also underscored – as Mrs Bezos herself pointed out – how the internet is enabling the characters in non-fiction to “step out of books . . . and speak for themselves”.

Amazon will be twenty years old next year and its decision to allow unvarnished book reviews was one of Mr Bezos’s boldest early decisions. Publishers disliked the idea of a bookseller providing a platform for criticism, but Amazon argued for transparency.

Mr Stone, the book’s author, told New York magazinethat he stood by the accuracy of his account of the “incredibly secretive company” and that he had strived to make sure it was balanced. He added: “I am less biased than Jeff’s own wife.”

Despite Mrs Bezos’s single star, Mr Stone’s book maintains an average score of 4.5 out of five stars from 44 reviewers on Amazon. It also got a flattering review from The New York Times’ influential book critic Michiko Kakutani.

Mrs Bezos’s latest thriller, Traps, has an average rating of four stars from 59 reviews. She and her future husband met at the hedge fund DE Shaw in New York where they both worked.

Amazon confirmed the authenticity of Mrs Bezos’s review and took the opportunity to attack the book itself. A spokesman said: “[Mr Stone] had every opportunity to thoroughly fact check and bring a more balanced viewpoint to his narrative, but he was very secretive about the book and simply chose not to.”

In the book Mr Stone says that Mr Bezos was “supportive of this project even though he judged that it was ‘too early’ for a reflective look” at the company.

Mr Stone did not interview Mr Bezos for the book but he said he drew on past conversations he had had with Amazon’s founder over the past decade. He interviewed some 300 other people, including senior Amazon executives.

Mrs Bezos also pointed out that two other reviewers with first-hand knowledge of some of the events in the book – one current and one retired Amazon employee – had challenged the accuracy of some details.